Way back in 1918, Max Fleischer gave us Out of the Inkwell, a series of shorts featuring Koko the Clown. Koko was an animated character interacting with live action people on screen. Audiences flocked to this rotoscoped novelty. In 1923, Walt Disney turned the idea around when he put Alice, a live action girl, into a cartoon world. Since then, there have been numerous attempts to combine animated characters into live-action films.

One of the greatest examples of this combination being used to expert perfection is the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In that film, real-life Eddie Valiant and cartoon Roger Rabbit interact fluidly in both the live-action and animated settings. So Dear to My Heart, Song of the South, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Mary Poppins, The Pirate Movie, Cool World, and many others combined animated and live characters to varying degrees of success. Some movies, like Xanadu and The Star Wars Holiday Special just skip over the interaction and include full-animated segments.

With the invention of CGI, animated characters have become even more realistic, reaching a point now where real actors who have passed away are being played by animated versions of themselves on screen. This was done with mixed results in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The animated character replacements looked fairly convincing, but there is still something not quite right about them. Something just a little disconcerting.

Is it convincing? When Koko or Roger Rabbit move around, no one minds at all. The filmmakers are not trying to convince us that they are anything more than a living cartoon, so we accept the effect and enjoy the movie. But when Jar-Jar Binks interacts with Qui Gon Jinn, we spend more time analyzing the character than enjoying the movie. No matter whom the character is, from Jerry the Mouse in Anchors Aweigh to CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic World, it is almost impossible not to notice.

So, I turn to you. Do animated characters work in live-action movies? Who are some of your favorite animated stars? Should Hollywood be animating actors who are no longer with us? Let us know!

About Rotoscopers

Rotoscopers is an animation news, reviews, and interviews site for animation addicts young and old. In addition to articles, the site has a podcast called the Animation Addicts Podcast and YouTube channel.

JamScoBal

You seem to be avoiding films like G-Force, Tiny Soldiers, Cats vs Dogs, The Smurfs, The Chipmunks, and Hop. I don’t blame you since those were all horrible movies but they do count. It seems to me that when it is done with 2D and live action it can be okay or even great, but when done with 3D it somehow does not work. I can’t tell you why. As for Grand Moff Tarkin I view that as more of vfx then anything else.

Manuel Orozco

I liked the first two Smurf movies but not as much as the Lost Village.

Yellow

That’s a good point. I think the reason it doesn’t work in those movies is because they’re trying to make the characters “realistic” (CGI in a live-action setting) and “cartoony” (basically the designs) at the same time, so it ends up not fully appealing to either and is just lukewarm.

Manuel Orozco

I don’t blame you. That’s why I prefer the Chipmunks 80’s looks than their CGI movie forms as much as I enjoyed their first three movies. And the first time I’ve seen CGI and live action together was Casper.

Sasha

I honestly love live-action/animated blending, but it has gotten a bit over saturated over time. I love Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I feel like it’ one of the very few films that combines 2d/live-action flawlessly (with believable eyeline matches and animated characters interacting with real-world objects and leaving fingerprint/visible tampering behind, etc.) My problem is mainly that studios don’t seem interested in doing creative stuff like that anymore. With the technology we have now it’s easy to do realistic CGI renders, so it’s almost not that impressive when we see them interact with live-action characters and environments on-screen. But 2D and live-action are so distinctly different that it would still be interesting to see all the directions they could take by blending the two.

Casey Oswald

I wonder if they could ever do a movie like Roger Rabbit again. That took a lot of studios working together.

Trevor Roberts

It all depends on the intent of the animators. In Rogue One, for example, the intent of CGI Peter Kushing is obviously to replicate the original actor as much as possible, to the point where we can’t tell that he was animated. Unfortunately, we just aren’t yet able to animate humans to that effect, so when he appears in the movie, it’s really jarring.

With something like Roger Rabbit, however, we are placed in a world that is established as unrealistic and zany, so we are willing to suspend our disbelief of the fact that we are watching animated characters in a real life setting.

Manuel Orozco

I agree about the intention part

Casey Oswald

I like it when they are going for zany characters. I can accept the cartoon character as a zany addition to our world.

Jeremiah

Chump that I am, I didn’t even realize Peter Kushing was CG. He looked a little off somehow and I was vaguely distracted for a couple of moments, but that’s all. So it totally worked on me.

Manuel Orozco

All I can say is for the combination to work, it has to serve a purpose in terms of storytelling. As for reanimating Tarkin in Rogue One, it managed to give the movie a minor nostalgia boost.

Alex Beezley

I think that live-action/animation hybrids work the best when the animation is 2D. I have not been that impressed with CGI characters in live-action films, aside from a few notable exceptions such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Stuart Little films. As the article mentions, these characters are sometimes disconcerting and distract from the plot of their respective films. Hopefully technology will improve to the point that the artificiality of these figures is not as noticeable.

While there have been many animated characters interacting with humans lately, they’re almost always played up as being part of our world. For example, Groot and Rocket felt perfectly at home in Guardians of the Galaxy, and felt like they were supposed to be there.

What we don’t see much of now is the zaniness that animated characters are capable of. It’s unlikely that the live action Aladdin will have an animated Genie that comes close to the craziness of the animated film. When do we get to see that again? Space Jam 2, I guess?

Manuel Orozco

I’m being cautious about Will Smith’s interpretation of Genie but I agree with everything else you said. Except, It’s been a while since we last heard word about Space Jam 2.